Trials of the Lincolnshire prisoners.
A hundred had been surrendered; nineteen were executed.
The materials for the prosecution were complete. It remained to proceed with the trials. But I must first mention the fate of the prisoners from Lincolnshire, who had been already disposed of. In their case there was not the complication of a pardon. They had been given up hot-handed by their confederates, as the principal instigators of the rebellion. More than a hundred seem to have been sent originally to the Tower. Upwards of half of these were liberated after a short imprisonment. On the 6th of March Sir William Parr, with a special commission, sat at Lincoln, to try the Abbot of Kirkstead, with thirty of the remainder. The Lincoln jury regarded the prisoners favourably; Thomas Moigne, one or the latter, spoke in his defence for three hours so skilfully, according to Sir William Parr’s report, that “but for the diligence of the king’s serjeant,” he and all the rest would have been acquitted. Ultimately the crown secured their verdict: the abbot, Moigne, and another were hanged on the following day at Lincoln, and four others a day or two later at Louth and Horncastle.[248] The commission petitioned for the pardon of the rest. After a delay of a few weeks the king consented, and they were dismissed.[249]
Trial of Lord Hussey.
Twelve more, the Abbot of Barlings, one of his monks, and others who had been concerned in the murder of the chancellor, were then brought to the bar in the Guildhall. They had no claim to mercy; and they found none. They were hung on gibbets, at various towns, in their own county, as signs and warnings. Lord Hussey was tried by the peers. He was guilty obviously of having fled from a post which he was bound to defend. He had obstructed good subjects, who would have done their duty, had he allowed them; and he had held communication with the rebels. His indictment[250] charges him with acts of more direct complicity, the evidence of which I have not discovered. But wherever a comparison has been possible, I have found the articles of accusation in so strict accordance with the depositions of witnesses, that the absent link may be presumed to have existed. The construction may be violent; the fact is always true. He, too, was found guilty, and executed.[251]
With Lord Hussey the Lincolnshire list was closed. Out of fifty or sixty thousand persons who had been in armed rebellion, the government was satisfied with the punishment of twenty. The mercy was perhaps in part dictated by prudence.
May. The second trials.
The government find a difficulty in obtaining the verdicts. One of the prisoners is acquitted. A list of the grand jury is sent to London.
The turn of the northern men came next. There were three sections of them:—Sir Francis Bigod, George Lumley, and those who had risen in January in the East Riding; Sir Thomas Percy, the Abbot of Fountains, the Abbot of Jervaulx, Sir John and Lady Bulmer, Sir Ralph Bulmer, and Sir Stephen Hamarton, who had been concerned in the separate commotions since suppressed by the Duke of Norfolk; and, finally, Aske, Constable, and Lord Darcy, with their adherents. In this instance the proceedings were less simple than in the former, and in some respects unusual. The inferior offenders were first tried at York. The indictments were sent in to the grand jury; and in the important case of Levening, the special confederate of Aske and Darcy, whose guilt was identical with theirs, no bill was found. The king, in high displeasure, required Norfolk to take some severe notice of this obstruction of justice. Norfolk remonstrated; and was requested, in sharper language, to send up a list of the jurors,[252] and unravel, if possible, the cause of the acquittal. The names were forwarded. The panel was composed of fifty gentlemen, relatives, most of them, of one or other of the accused persons, and many among whom had formed part of the insurgent council at Pomfret.[253] Levening’s escape was explained; and yet it could not be remedied. The crown was forced to continue its prosecutions, apparently with the same difficulty, and under the same uncertainty of the issue. When the trials of the higher offenders were opened in London, true bills had first to be found against them in their own counties; and the foremen of the two grand juries (for the fifty were divided into two bodies of twenty-five each) were Sir James Strangways and Sir Christopher Danby, noted, both of them, on the list which was forwarded to the crown, as relatives of Lord Darcy, Sir Francis Bigod, and Sir John Bulmer.[254]
May 9. True bills found against Darcy and fifteen others.